Cough. Another “advertiser special” here — although I’m expecting more negative comments in this one. Anyhow. Virpus is offering a promo code for LowEndBox readers — LEB-11 to get $2 off each month on their Budget VPS, which you pay monthly. So their “Basic VPS” is now $5/month (ordering link here).

512MB guaranteed/2048MB burstable memory

50GB storage

1000GB/month data transfer

OpenVZ/SolusVM

Servers in Kansas City (test IP: 208.89.210.1), and you can read more about their infrastructure/setup here. Virpus has been around for quite a while, and their 512MB budget VPS has been hovering between $5-$7 for more than a year now. Yes it is cheaper than the previous QuickWeb offer, has more memory, bigger disk, and more monthly data, although from some past experience you do get what you have paid for. I guess the question would be — how good are they when you compare with other OpenVZ providers selling VPS at ~$5-$6 with 512MB guaranteed memory?

The original owner of LowEndBox known as "LowEndAdmin" or "LEA" for short founded LowEndBox in 2008 and created the concept of hosting applications on low resource "Low End Boxes". After creating the roots of the community that we know today, "LEA" stepped aside and allowed others to carry the torch forward.

I’ve used Virpus before and their Xen VPSs had the best performance and stability of any provider I had used. Their support was lacking though and if you do a search for them on WHT you’ll find some current horror stories. The only reason I left them is because when I tried to upgrade my VPS they wouldn’t reply to my ticket so I had to move elsewhere or run out of space. :(

I’ve been using Virpus for a few months now (3+). From what I can tell, their I/O isn’t up to par but they have decent uptime. Some time ago, they started doing automated backups. That really kills the I/O during certain hours of the day.

We are working on optimizing the priority of gzips (which as you said, does affect node performance during certain hours). So far it has helped reduce the load during times of backups. We’ll be applying the same config on more nodes.

How do the provider know which files should back up? A lot of files I have on my filesystems are considered “transient”, i.e. they can be easily re-generated from my important files which I keep regular backups, in a schedule that’s suitable to my usage pattern.

I much prefer to be on the node with no backups, with a bunch of neighbours who know what they are doing.

I have to agree, in fact, I would prefer it if a company did not make backups of my data on my servers. If Virpus’ case, I would set a side some nodes that do not run backups and have the client opt-in for automated backups (or even charge extra for them or only include them with your managed packages if you offer managed/unmanaged).

There’s a offsite backup option enabled in SolusVM and from what I can tell, each user can click that button themselves. An email once a week or however long (probably an opt in option or an unsubscribe option so it’s not spam) reminding users to backup their data is more than enough.

2. Support ticket are worthless (*_*) they cant give priority support in time.

3. If you open ticket, they will give you some funny and joking answer.

4. They purchase their server from wholesaleinternet, if you want to fresh start just start your own company from wholesaleinternet directly. But not with virpus. They oversold every 49$ server that they get from wholesaleinternet. And put nearly 20~30 customers per server. How this will give you guaranteed 512MB memory when the main server memory is only 4GB? 4 GB with HDD shared memory oversold to these 30 customers :))

5. Previously their vps was hacked. Search on webhostingtalk. Nearly 200 person leave this people because of poor support and recent data loss. After that their support even goes worst much longer. Check virpus-forum. See how customers are blaming them, even they did not check those forum posts, lol :D

Virpus, they had a limited offer a while ago on their website, the lower OpenVZ plan becomes $3 by annual payment :)
Their VPS is a good fit for backup use. Also good choice for cheap DirectAdmin CP with low budget.
Aside from that, performance and uptime might be not always good, or the best you can get.

@ Kjetil: You have a point, well done. And just to be fair regarding nodes, I think they looks to have at least several good/not-oversold nodes.. :p

I have been using virpus since 02/19/2010. My first one that I paid for 7/month with DAdm control panel work pretty good for 7 months. After that I went to the south like US housing market (e.g: up time, performance and even connectivity). I was aware of their problem with network and hardware problems.
After 3 more months of yo yo on my vps, I was deciding to cancel my vps.
At that time,virpus offered 35/year plan. So, I ordered one and canceled my 7/month account.

What is a jerk, is sending me messages every 2 minutes to the point of periodically blocking you. We have nearly 2000 VM’s – open a ticket – I’m sorry but I cannot attend to a single customer with less than a minute responses. I responded to you as a courtesy. My personal AIM is not a official channel to reach us on.

And after asking you 3 times now, it is obvious you STILL have not read the reseller agreement. You DO NOT need 6 VPS’s to resell our services. However by the 45th day, you would need at least 6 services to keep your discount, as said in our agreement. I’m not sure if your account was overlooked or what, but at the time you asked me about your situation, I looked at your account and saw you were getting a discount and shouldn’t – so I revoked it at the time.

I’ve been nothing but patient trying to get my issues solved, but I can’t even get a decent response from Virpus.
I’ve tried support tickets twice, escalating them, and contacting general@virpusnetworks.net directly; but I have been pointedly ignored.

I’m a pretty reasonable guy, but it’s impossible to deal with a company that is completely unresponsive.

[humour]You don’t know what you’re talking about since you used the wrong sense of Their. You can’t be a server admin since we all know we all have perfect grammar and pose.[/humour]

A bunch of bull if you ask me…

Anyway I’ve always wondered about outsourced tech. I outsource our first and second level tech and we split third level. They do have permission to contact the datacenter to request hands on if I’m not available, even if it’s billable. (I get like 5 hours included with each rack each month.) We’ve never really had an issue with them not being able to do something.

Seriously, I consider them no less than a scam.
The file io made them completely unusable for me; and when I tried to take it up with them (through multiple channels), I didn’t even get a reply. They’re not a serious company.

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